1257276 - Allow specification of environment variables when creating child processes

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1297740

(Core :: Security: Process Sandboxing, defect, P2)

Description

[(No longer employed by Mozilla) Aaron Klotz]

It would be nice to be able to specify the environment of a child process as we're creating it. This is not currently possible (at least in the sandboxed Windows case) because chromium always passes NULL to CreateProcess for the child process's environment.

Exposing this will require that some changes be made upstream.

Comment 1

[(No longer employed by Mozilla) Aaron Klotz]

The primary use case for this is to be able to specify TMP/TEMP/TMPDIR at process creation time, instead of having a window during process startup where those variables point to paths that are restricted by the sandbox.

This would probably help with the NVIDIA shader cache situation, but more importantly, allows me to remove some hacks that were added to the crash reporter.

Comment 2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

The most logical would be to support EnvironmentMap on Windows next to OS_POSIX. CreateProcess has an lpEnvironment that looks suitable.

Upstream (chromium) does not seem to support this.

Comment 3

[(No longer employed by Mozilla) Aaron Klotz]

\o/ We're definitely going to need this if we're going to use the sandbox for the InjectEject bootstrap process.

Comment 4

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Attachment: WIP patch for Windows side

Comment 5

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Fixed by Bug 1297740.